Do you know how many unicorns there were when Aileen Lee crowned them with this now-ubiquitous nickname in her 2013 TechCrunch column? Only 39. And at the time, nobody could have guessed that more than a thousand private tech companies would eventually reach the coveted $1 billion valuation tag. Sure, it helped that we’ve since broadened our definition to include startups from around the world instead of focusing on the U.S. market, but still.
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We’ve witnessed an incredible unicorn stampede over the last 10 years, until their birth pace dramatically slowed since the second half of 2022. But the numbers are so telling, and the geographical spread so interesting, that we decided to put this into charts, with data from Crunchbase and Dealroom.
Once a unicorn, always a unicorn? For this exercise, yes: We are looking at the rounds that minted new unicorns, when they happened, and in which locations. But we are not actually counting living unicorns; we just don’t have enough data for that.
That said, the number of unicorns that outright went the way of the dodo is relatively low. However, plenty of them lost their horn, although it is hard to tell how many until their down valuation becomes official. In the meantime, remember to read the charts below with this important caveat in mind.
Unicorns, charted
Let’s start with unicorn birth year, tracking when billion-dollar startups achieved that valuation milestone:
In 2013, unicorns were as rare as their nickname suggests. This became less and less true from 2015 onward, but with ebbs and flows until the real stampede began. The number of startups that secured billion-dollar valuations increased significantly in the last quarter of 2020 before reaching record levels in 2021.
Last quarter, only seven companies became unicorns, according to Crunchbase. You’d have to go back to Q3 2017 to find a similarly low number.
But of course, quantity doesn’t mean quality; we are willing to bet that the unicorns minted this year are of much higher quality than the ones that raised their mega-rounds during the hype. But knowing that large funds need unicorn-level exits, we also understand that many can’t wait for mega-sized checks to make a comeback.
Thinking about exits
From money in to money out, here’s the cash-out results from unicorns in recent years:
Just like unicorn births, unicorn exits peaked in 2021, both in deal count — 96 — and in cumulative value: no less than $965.94 billion, according to Crunchbase. And since exit and exit value are core to what VC is all about, seeing these numbers fall to levels unseen since 2016 is even more concerning than last quarter’s low unicorn creation count.
Where are unicorns built?
Anyone who tracks venture capital numbers knows that the United States holds an outsized position in the global startup ecosystem. But did you expect the geographical unicorn distribution to be this extreme?
Entrepreneurship organization Endeavor recently observed that unicorns are “no longer rare and [are] increasingly global.” While both remarks are true, and despite the fact that a company no longer has to be U.S-based to fit the definition, the USA is still home to the largest number of unicorns by a massive margin. That said, the long tail of unicorns is impressive, with 14 countries witnessing more than 10 unicorn births.
What are those unicorns eating?
Cash, mostly. And that means that where we see the most mega-rounds, or venture deals that are worth $100 million or more, we tend to see more unicorns. As a result, if we narrow our focus down to cities instead of countries, we tend to see unicorns born where we have also seen the largest number of truly massive venture capital rounds:
You expected San Francisco to be atop the chart, but did you anticipate how close New York would land to it? Also, seeing Beijing and Shanghai so high on the chart is interesting; given that Chinese venture capital totals have slowed, we might want to recut the data in the future by time period. If we redid the above chart with a focus on the last two years, the ranking would change somewhat dramatically.
But our goal is a more inclusive look at unicorn creation across time, and that means that China does well. London is also up there, with other European cities making an appearance. Apart from places in Europe (and the U.K.), the United States and China, only one other city managed to crack the charts. Points to Bangalore.
Show me all of that, but over time
Finally, we’ve prepared a time-lapse of unicorn births over the last decade around the world. For this particular bit of data-viz, we used Dealroom data. You are going to want to watch it twice. Can you spot your favorite unicorn?
While we’re on the other side of the unicorn boom, we remain firmly in the unicorn era. Billion-dollar startups are going to remain with us so long as venture capital funds are as big as they are, and technology remains as central as it is to our daily personal and work lives. Put another way, we don’t expect unicorn creation to ever cease but to ebb and flow instead.
Here’s to whatever the next 10 years will bring!